Ever since income inequality began its sharp rise in the 1980s, one favorite conservative excuse has been that it doesn’t mean anything, because economic positions change all the time. People who are rich this year might not be rich next year, so the gap between the rich and the rest doesn’t matter, right?
Well, it’s true that people move up and down the economic ladder, and apologists for inequality love to cite statistics showing that many people who are in the top 1 percent in any given year are out of that category the next year.
.. This is why you shouldn’t grieve over Marco Rubio’s epic political failure. Had Mr. Rubio succeeded, he would simply have encouraged his party to believe that all it needs is a cosmetic makeover — a fresher, younger face to sell the same old defunct orthodoxy.
.. What we’re getting instead is at least the possibility of a cleansing shock — of a period in the political wilderness that will finally force the Republican establishment to rethink its premises.
The Upper Middle Class Is Ruining America
I first encountered the upper middle class when I attended a big magnet high school in Manhattan that attracted a decent number of brainy, better-off kids whose parents preferred not to pay private-school tuition.
.. By the time I made it to a selective college, I found myself entirely surrounded by this upper-middle-class tribe. My fellow students and my professors were overwhelmingly drawn from comfortably affluent families hailing from an almost laughably small number of comfortably affluent neighborhoods, mostly in and around big coastal cities. Though virtually all of these polite, well-groomed people were politically liberal, I sensed that their gut political instincts were all about protecting what they had and scratching out the eyeballs of anyone who dared to suggest taking it away from them.
.. though many of the upper-middle-class individuals I’ve come to know are good, decent people, I’ve come to the conclusion that upper-middle-class Americans threaten to destroy everything that is best in our country.
.. We could define it by income—say, all single adults who earn more than $100,000 a year, or all married couples that earn more than $200,000—but that’s too crude. Let’s just say that upper-middle-class status is a state of mind. We’re talking about families that earn well into the six-figure range yet don’t feel rich, either because of their student loan debt or the enormous cost of the amenities they consider nonnegotiable: living in well-above-average school districts for those with children or living in “cool” neighborhoods for those without.
.. Upper-middle-class Americans vote at substantially higher ratesthan those less well-off, and though their turnout levels aren’t quite as high as those even richer than they are, there are far more upper-middle-class people than there are rich people.
.. Another thing that separates the upper middle class from the truly wealthy is that even though they’re comfortable, they’re less able to take the threat of tax increases or benefit cuts in stride. Take away the mortgage interest deduction from a Koch brother and he’ll barely notice. Take it away from a two-earner couple living in an expensive suburb and you’ll have a fight on your hands. So the upper middle class often uses its political muscle to foil the fondest wishes of egalitarian liberals.
.. Many smart people—the libertarian Peter Suderman of Reason, the neoliberal Josh Barro of the New York Times, and conservative Patrick Brennan of National Review, among others—have made the point that if Obama and his allies can’t even tweak the tax treatment of this tiny little savings plan, they sure as hell can’t succeed in raising other taxes enough to finance entitlement spending as the baby boomers retire in ever-larger numbers in the decades to come, let alone expand social services and public investment with an eye toward making the United States just a bit more Scandinavian.
.. The reason is that high-skilled immigrants squeeze the wages of upper-middle-class professionals, who can afford to take a hit while lowering the cost of various services for poorer people by giving them the option of going to cheaper doctors and dentists... in California, at least, it is liberal cities that have the most stringent zoning regulations. It seems that upper-middle-class California liberals use their supposed environmentalism to justify policies that wind up excluding the less well-off, despite the enormous environmental benefits that would flow from allowing more people to live in coastal California communities... The upper middle class controls the media we consume. They run our big bureaucracies, our universities, and our hospitals. Their voices drown out those of other people at almost every turn. I fear that the only way we can check the tendency of upper-middle-class people to look out for their own interests at the expense of others is to make them feel at least a little guilty about it. It’s not much, but it’s a start.
The False Promise of Last Year’s Wage Gains
According to EPI, if wages had kept pace with productivity growth over 30 or so years, a worker making $50,000 today would instead be earning about $75,000. Instead, the gains from productivity have been channeled elsewhere, often to executives and shareholders.
In 2015, things seemed like they might be getting back on track. Nominal wages (that is, wage growth not adjusted for inflation) increased by 1.8 percent on the year. But according to the report, 2015’s uptick was caused by a decrease in inflation rather than an improvement in actual wages, and when looking at real wages (adjusted for inflation) and factoring in core inflation, which specifically removes more volatile portions of the inflation measure—wage growth was zero.
Three Places Obama Could Teach
No doubt, Columbia would offer him a king’s ransom and every other academic perk imaginable. But, for me, to find the first black President—a former community organizer who has ventured more daringly outside the Oval Office (with a stop at a prison, a speech at a mosque, an impending visit to Cuba) than any other modern President—teaching at Columbia (or any school like it) would be a disappointment. To put it bluntly, rich white kids at rich white schools don’t need him. But there are places, and students, that do. I’d like to suggest three.
..Obama could teach at a historically black college/university, or H.B.C.U., as the common parlance has it. Some of the most illustrious names of the past American century, from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Thurgood Marshall to Toni Morrison, were educated at these schools.
.. Yet another place that could make great use of Obama’s talent and prestige would be any one of the nation’s eleven hundred community colleges.
.. The third place Obama could teach is perhaps the most improbable, but the one I hope he most strongly considers. I think Obama should teach, for one year, for even just part of the time, in an inner-city K-12 public school. A single course in U.S. government for high-school seniors would suit him well.
.. In 2013, less than two per cent of public-school teachers were black men, which tells us that the overwhelming majority of kids, both black and white, have little direct exposure to professional black men in their daily lives. This has had a disastrous effect on the development of black students, and especially black boys, contributing to their staggering levels of behavioral issues, suspensions, and, ultimately, dropouts.
.. A recent study by the Department of Education found that black boys receive more than two-thirds of all public-school suspensions. Another study showed that black students are less likely to be recommended for gifted programs when they are taught by non-black teachers.